Saint Joseph Catholic Church

Speaking at Re-Imagine Peace, an event in Florence that featured Israeli and Palestinian musicians, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem emphasized the importance of seeing the other not as “an enemy, not a threat, nor a category, but a person.”

“Listening should be one of the most revolutionary acts at our disposal,” Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, O.F.M., said on July 12. “Listening does not mean agreeing; it does not mean abandoning one’s own convictions. It means acknowledging that the pain of the other exists even when it does not coincide with our own.”

Statistician Ryan Burge said that the Archdiocese of Detroit has posted workbooks that offer “unprecedented access into what is happening at the parish level across hundreds of churches in Michigan.”

In this article, Burge, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and a former Baptist pastor, offers a “30,000 foot view of the Archdiocese of Detroit based on the metrics provided in these workbooks.”

Burge writes:

In 2011, the average weekend Mass attendance in the Archdiocese was about 231,000 people. That dropped below 200,000 by 2015, it declined to 163,000 by 2019. The most recent data that these workbooks provide is from 2024, when Mass attendance was just under 140,000. According to their own reports, the Catholic Church in Detroit is recording an attendance decline of 4% per year ...

If Mass attendance had simply kept pace with population growth since 2011, roughly 236,000 Catholics would show up to a Detroit-area parish this weekend. The actual number is 139,000—about 40% lower. The archdiocese is currently filling about 29% of its available pew space on a given weekend. If current trends hold, that number could slip below 20% within a few years. That’s a church with an empty building problem.

Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication, warned in an editorial against “any glorification or exaggeration of the Pope’s role as head of state, any emphasis on the importance of this role.”

In “The Pope always speaks as a Shepherd,” Tornielli wrote that “it is true that, to guarantee the absolute freedom of the Vicar of Christ, it was established nearly a century ago that there would be a tiny patch of land where the Bishop of Rome and Shepherd of the Universal Church would also be sovereign—and thus head of state. But this was, and remains, an arrangement designed to recognize precisely this need for independence from any other state, and not an affirmation of a dual mission.”

Tornielli concluded:

When he calls for human life to be respected and protected at every stage of its existence, when he speaks of peace with the good of all peoples in mind and calls for an end to the mad arms race—even going beyond the concept of a “just war”—when he calls for dialogue and negotiation by invoking the Magisterium of Social Doctrine, when he calls for migrants to be regarded as people to be welcomed, without ever forgetting their human dignity; when he reminds us that the poor are at the heart of the Gospel and that we must build more just and equitable societies; when he defends the right to religious freedom; when he emphasizes the importance of caring for Creation so that we may pass it on to our children and grandchildren—the Successor of Peter is not speaking as a head of state. He is simply proclaiming the Gospel.

Tornielli’s editorial followed a New York Times interview with Brian Burch, the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. The newspaper reported that “Mr. Burch argued that when the pope spoke out against the war, he was not doing so as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, the vicar of Christ, but only as the sovereign political leader of the Vatican City-State.”

A three-day gathering begins today at Borgo Laudato Si’ to draft the Rome Declaration for a Disarmed and Disarming Peace in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear and Autonomous Weapons, New Digital Protocols, and Emerging Models of Digital Development.

The Global Nobel Laureates Assembly on Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear War, with the assistance of Domus Communis Foundation and a dozen other institutions, has organized the gathering for 200 people, including Nobel laureates, former heads of state, AI experts, and scholars from universities. The president of the Domus Communis (Common Home) Foundation is Cardinal Silvano Tomasi, C.S., a retired Vatican diplomat.

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Today the USA celebrates the Memorial of St. Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680). Kateri was born in 1656 near the town of Auriesville, New York, the daughter of a Mohawk warrior. She was baptized by Jesuit missionary Fr. Jacques de Lambertville on Easter of 1676 at the age of twenty. She devoted her life to prayer, penitential practices, and the care of the sick and aged in Caughnawaga near Montreal (where her relics are now enshrined). She incurred the hostility of her tribe because of her faith. She was devoted to the Eucharist, and to Jesus Crucified, and was called the "Lily of the Mohawks." She died in 1680 and was beatified June 22, 1980, and canonized on October 21, 2012--the first native American to be declared "Blessed" and "Saint."

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